Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  POPOV MADE A sudden jerking movement and looked away, as if he suddenly realized they could see his pain and might be reveling in it.

  “My daughter married and had a child,” he said after a moment, then he paused and his mouth pulled into a wry smile. “My legitimate daughter, I should say…. And she had a child, a son. He is twenty-one now. Twenty-one! And he has alveolar soft-part sarcoma.” Another twisted smile. “A mouthful of a disease, is it not? ‘A rare and always fatal form of cancer,’ the doctors told me that day. I didn’t want to believe them.”

  Popov turned back around, and the desperation on his face now was as disfiguring as scars. “It began with a tumor in his thigh. ‘Cut it out,’ I told the doctors, ‘take the whole leg if you have to, but get it out of him.’ In the end, they did take his leg, but the cancer had already metastasized to his lungs and brain. They gave him a year at the most to live. That was eight months ago, and now he swallows OxyContin like breath mints for the pain. He barely weighs a hundred pounds.”

  “I’m sorry,” Zoe said.

  “Sorry?” Popov choked over the word. “Your sorry has no place in this. It is too puny. He is my Igor. My Igor, and I love him more than anything on this earth, more than my life. If God would let me die in his place, I would.”

  “But you can’t die,” Ry said, “so you kill for him instead.”

  “Nothing, no one else matters, but Igor. The altar of bones is the only hope he has left. It has given me a hundred and twelve years so far, and I feel and look like a man of what? Fifty-five? I’ve never been sick for a day since I drank from it, not even a sniffle. It worked a miracle on me, and it will work a miracle on Igor.”

  Popov focused on Zoe’s face and she saw the hardness and cruelty come over him, like a steel curtain slamming down. “You are going to take me to the altar of bones, and I will use it to save my Igor. Whether you do so willingly or unwillingly—it does not matter.”

  Zoe felt tears press against her eyes. This story of his Igor slowly dying, the pain she could see in Popov—it all seemed real, but, Remember, trust no one, her grandmother had written. No one. Beware the hunters.

  “Why do you need her?” Ry said. “You already tricked your Lena into taking you to it when she was a nurse at Norilsk. You know where it is, so what’s been stopping you from going back?”

  Popov slashed his hand through the air. “Do you think I haven’t been back to that cave dozens of times? An avalanche buried the entrance, and Lena along with it, and it took three days and fifty zeks to dig out the snow, but the cavern was still there, behind the frozen waterfall, and the altar made out of human bones was inside, with the spring bubbling away underneath it.”

  He stopped, and a faraway look came into his eyes. “I was out of my head with fever and near death when she brought me to the cave. The altar of bones was in the gruel she fed me, one drop, that’s all she needed to save me, but I never saw where she got it from. I thought it had to be the boiling spring—why else would they have built that altar made of human bones on top of it?”

  He blew out a ragged laugh. “God in heaven, I must have carried away dozens of bottles of the noxious stuff. From the spring at first, and then later from a pool that was in the center of the cavern. From the spring and the pool, and every other bit of moisture dripping from the ceiling and oozing out of the walls, and none of it did a thing. I tried it out on the desperately sick and the dying, and afterward they were still sick and still dying. I had a dozen scientists study it and they all told me it was only water. Well, water polluted from the nickel mining, but water nonetheless. And Lena …?” He snapped his fingers. “Poof. Gone into thin air, from a cave whose only way in or out had been buried for days beneath a mountain of snow.”

  He braced his fists on the table and brought his face close to Zoe’s. “So one thing I do know for a certainty. That altar in your little Keeper cave, the one built above a spring and made of human bones, the one that anyone can see with his own eyes … that altar is a lie. The real altar of bones is something else, somewhere else, and you are either going to tell me where it is or take me to it. Your choice. But those are the only two choices I am giving you.”

  Zoe’s eyes were steady on his face. “You can give me a hundred choices and it wouldn’t matter. I don’t know where it is. Maybe my grandmother Katya knew, but you hunted her down for most of her life and then you killed her before she had a chance to tell me.”

  “Yes, you are right. I hunted her for years, but she was like her mother, Lena—good at escaping from seemingly impossible traps. When my agents found her little girl, Anna Larina, in an orphanage in Ohio, I was sure I had her then, that she would not stay away from the child forever, but I was wrong. All those years I watched and waited for her to seek out the daughter she’d abandoned, and to meet you, her granddaughter, but she never did. So wary, she was, and so clever, until the end when the cancer got her and she grew careless. Or perhaps merely desperate to pass her knowledge on to the next Keeper before she died.”

  He stared at Zoe hard for a moment longer, then straightened, shaking his head. “That is why I think you are lying to me. Playing me, as you Americans say. You are the Keeper now, and you know where the altar is, because the Keeper always knows where it is.”

  He turned away, as if dismissing her, and Vadim, who’d understood nothing of the English words, must have taken this as his cue because he straightened and said, “Now, Pakhan?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?” Zoe cried. She tried to get up again, but the handcuff still held her fast to the eyebolt in the table. “What are you going to do? Don’t hit him again. Please.”

  “She’s begging you not to hit him, Vadim,” Popov said in Russian to his enforcer, and the two men shared a laugh.

  RY WATCHED AS Vadim lit up a fresh cigarette, drawing on it deeply, seeming to relish the burn of the smoke as it went down his throat, and Ry felt that first lick of fear because he knew what was coming.

  He also knew he could take it because he’d lived through much worse. But Zoe—he could tell by her face that she had no real idea of what was happening, and he ached for her because he knew she would blame herself afterward.

  Vadim laid his Bic down on the table, took a couple more deep drags off the cigarette, then stared at its glowing red tip and smiled.

  “Hold him down.”

  Ry heard a step behind him, and Zoe shouting, “No, don’t,” but it all happened so fast. A thick, heavy hand gripped the back of his head, pulling it back, exposing his neck, and an instant later he felt the burning cigarette sear like the fire of a thousand suns into the right side of his throat.

  He trapped the yell of agony that rose up inside of him through a sheer force of will. Jesus God, it hurt. He could smell his own skin sizzling.

  Through the pain shrieking in his head, he heard Zoe screaming, and the rattle of her handcuff as she tried to pull it out of the table with brute force. Then he thought it must be over, because Zoe stopped screaming and Popov’s face appeared before his watery vision.

  “My great-granddaughter seems to be in some considerable distress, Agent O’Malley. She must truly be quite fond of you.”

  Ry fought to get his breathing back under control. He was bathed in a cold sweat and he wanted to puke. The ravaged nerves in his neck had been shocked into silence for the moment, but he knew the pain would come back any second now, and with a vengeance.

  “You want her to make something up just to get you to stop?” Ry said. “Listen to me, she doesn’t know where it is.”

  “I think she does. And after we have hurt you enough, she will tell me.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Zoe shouted. Such pure female exasperation was in her voice, both men stopped glaring at each other to look at her.

  Her face was wet with tears, but fury was in her eyes, and Ry loved her for it. “For someone who’s supposed to be a hundred and twelve, you sure haven’t evolved much,” she said to Popov with the best sneer th
at Ry had ever seen on any mouth, and he loved her even more. “Do you get your jollies off of torture?”

  Popov looked taken aback, then his lips twitched, as if he were genuinely amused. “A small jolly perhaps. But then Vadim can do much worse damage than a cigarette burn or two. Much, much worse. He does this thing with a pair of bolt clippers…. But if you tell me now how to find the altar, it won’t have to come to that.”

  “I don’t know how to find it—”

  Popov turned and snapped his fingers at Vadim. “Again,” he said in Russian. “Do it on an eyeball this time.”

  “No, wait. Stop,” Zoe cried. “Oh, God, stop.”

  She was tearing frantically at the collar of her parka, and for a moment Ry thought she was choking. Then he realized she was trying to dig out the green-skull amulet. “I’ll give it to you, okay? I’ll give it to you, only don’t hurt him any more.”

  She finally got the chain off from around her neck. She held the amulet tightly in her fist, hesitating, as if even now she was having a hard time letting it go. Then with an abrupt movement she slid it down the table toward Popov.

  He trapped it with his hand before it could fall to the floor. “What is this?”

  “You know what it is,” Zoe said, still breathing hard from her fear and her fury.

  Popov held the amulet up to the light, turning it over and over in his long fingers, studying it carefully.

  “I don’t know where the altar of bones is,” Zoe said. “I couldn’t even tell you how to get to the lake or the cave if my life depended on it. But that gooey stuff inside the amulet came from the altar. At one time there were two of them hidden inside the Lady icon. Katya gave one to Marilyn Monroe. That’s the other one. And if that story about your dying grandson wasn’t all just one big, fat lie, then I hope you get your miracle. But only for his sake.”

  “My miracle …”

  Popov’s fingers closed around the amulet, locking it up in his fist, and Ry saw the knuckles whiten. Then the Russian looked at Zoe, but if he felt anything for his great-granddaughter, it didn’t show on his face.

  “Well now, my dear,” he said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? But then few of you Keepers have ever been any good at keeping to your sacred duty, if history is anything to judge by. You give your secrets up so easily, as easily as you spread your legs, and for why?” He laughed. “Love.”

  “I hope you rot in hell,” Zoe said.

  Popov smiled. “No doubt I will. But not for a long, long time yet.”

  50

  NIKOLAI POPOV put the amulet around his own neck and stood before Zoe, looking down at her. He reached out to touch her, but she flinched away from him. So he let his hand fall back down at his side.

  “Why the sad eyes, my dear?” he said. “You will come away from this with your life. And your lover’s life, too, because you have proven your devotion to him so sweetly.”

  He paused, as if he expected a thank-you, but when she said nothing, his face hardened. “I know you also have the Kennedy film, and that I will let you keep. I don’t care what you do with it. I never wanted it, in spite of what Miles Taylor thought. You could release it in every multiplex across your large, obscene country if you like. Of the three of us involved in the assassination—four, if you count that fool Oswald—I am the only one still breathing—”

  “Miles Taylor is dead?”

  Popov laughed at the look of shock on Ry’s face. “As good as. You kids should really watch more CNN. Your Kingmaker had a massive stroke this past Saturday, and he is now in what they are calling ‘a permanent vegetative state.’ He can neither move nor speak, and a machine does his breathing for him. Whether there is any awareness in what is left of his brain”—Popov lifted his elegant shoulders in a shrug—“who knows?”

  He turned abruptly away from them. “Vadim?”

  Vadim, who was just reaching for the lighter he’d left on the table, straightened back up. He took the unlit cigarette out of his mouth and said, “Yes, Pakhan?”

  “You may uncuff them now, then call up to the farm and have one of the cars brought down here to take them back to the city…. What?” he said, at Zoe’s look of surprise. “Are you still thinking I am going to have you whacked, as they say in your silly American mafiya movies? My very own great-granddaughter?”

  And Ry knew, from the spark of pure malice he saw flash in Nikolai Popov’s eyes, that the man had every intention of having them killed. That the orders had in fact, been given to his two enforcers well before this final charade had even begun.

  POPOV DOFFED HIS head in a mocking good-bye and headed toward the back of the ruins, and the deep shadows behind the trailer. The meth was really cooking like mad now, Ry saw. Visible fumes were rising out of the open mouths of the mason jars filled with cold-medicine tablets soaking in muriatic acid.

  One spark, and this whole place really could blow to smithereens.

  All he needed was the spark, and Ry knew where he would find one. But he also needed to keep Popov here, in the slaughterhouse with them, until Vadim unlocked their handcuffs and he was free to make his move.

  “I want to know why you waited,” Ry called out to the pakhan’s departing back.

  Popov stopped and turned around. “Why I waited for what?”

  “You told my dad the president had to die because he drank from the altar of bones and that made him dangerous to the world. Yet you waited fifteen months after Marilyn gave the amulet to Bobby before you came to that conclusion. Why? What happened that made you decide he had to die?”

  Popov looked up at the ceiling, as if the real truth were to be found up there. “Why, why, why. Such a simple question, and so I will give you a simple answer. I did it for my country. Or rather for what my country was then. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

  This surprised Ry, although he knew it shouldn’t have, and Popov laughed. “What, Agent O’Malley? Do you think only you Americans are capable of patriotism?”

  Ry heard a stifled curse, and he glanced over at Vadim. The vor was patting down the pockets of his jogging suit, the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. Please, God, Ry thought, don’t tell me he’s lost the keys to my cuffs.

  “So are you saying you killed Kennedy because of the Cuban missile crisis?” Ry said to Popov. “He forced Khrushchev to back down, he humiliated your country, so you decided to make him pay?”

  “Make him pay? Mother of God, boy. This wasn’t some sandlot game we were playing. You weren’t alive then, so you don’t know what it was like. They called it the Cold War, but it wasn’t cold. It was a hot war and we were winning it. We were winning. Africa, South America, Southeast Asia—we had people’s revolutions going on everywhere, like little brush fires. Too many for the West to even hope to put out.”

  A brightness had come over Popov’s face, as if a fire had suddenly ignited inside him. His eyes burned with it, and Ry thought he was getting a glimpse of the man he had been when he was procurator general of the KGB in Moscow.

  “But there was always the risk one of our brush fires would start a conflagration that could erupt into a nuclear war,” Popov went on. “It was the fear lurking in all our hearts, that someday an American president or a Soviet premier would decide a line had been crossed, that he had to take a stand, to be a man. Or maybe he would simply lose his mind one day and push the red button, and our world would be gone in a radioactive flash.”

  Vadim still hadn’t found the damn key, but at least, Ry saw, Grisha had unlocked Zoe’s cuffs. She stood up now, rubbing the red marks they’d left on her wrists.

  “The night we killed Marilyn Monroe,” Popov was saying, “she told your father and me that she’d given the amulet to Robert Kennedy, to give to his brother. But there was no way of knowing whether the president ever got that silly bitch’s little gift, let alone whether he ever drank from it. So I waited and I watched him. He had Addison’s disease, so I waited to see if he got any better. And I watched him for signs of … of the d
ark side of the altar.”

  “Because you’d already seen those signs in yourself?”

  This time Popov’s laugh was a little too wild. “How could I have seen it in myself? I had been one of Joseph Stalin’s pet spies. Whatever lines of sanity and morality there are in this world, I crossed them long before I drank from the altar of bones.”

  “Here’s the fucker,” Ry heard Vadim mutter under his breath, and Ry’s thumping heart slowed a little. Soon now. Soon.

  “So I watched and I waited,” Popov said, “for any signs that your President Kennedy ever drank from the altar. And what is one of the first things to happen? He cuts a deal with Sam Giancana of your Italian mafiya to assassinate Fidel Castro. They put poison on Fidel’s cigars—can you imagine such a crazy thing as that? ‘This truly is the act of a madman,’ I thought to myself at the time, but I did nothing. Because the only certain and permanent solution I could think of was to kill the man, and although you might not believe me now, it was a path I was truly loath to take. But then there came the crisis he made over our missiles in Cuba, where he went right to the brink, and yet still I did nothing.”

  The cuffs were off at last. As Ry stood up, he brushed his hand across the table and palmed Vadim’s lighter, slipping it into his pocket.

  Popov was on a roll now, as if it were a relief to him to finally be able to explain to someone why he had committed one of the great crimes of the twentieth century.

  “He pushed us to the brink of nuclear war, and still I did nothing. Then one day Miles Taylor, my mole inside the administration, passed along a top-secret document to me, and I saw that it was a detailed plan for an American invasion of North Vietnam, already set for the following spring. Sixty thousand combat troops, with full air and sea support, were to hit the beaches south of Haiphong harbor and sweep towards Hanoi. While your air force would nuke the rail and road passes between North Vietnam and China.